Quote Originally Posted by blindbox View Post
He asked his engineers directly.

It's more likely the reply he got were solely based on synthetics and also the newest instruction sets, or on server workloads.
I think that engineers building a new microarchitecture won't measure performance or IPC by executing 10h, NHLM, Atom or 386 traces. They would use SPEC or other workloads as it is common for scientific research and assume it to be compiled for the target hardware. This could well be the base for when they are talking about IPC.